Forced day (partially) off

Some days the schedules align themselves to maximize the gaps between activities and bring productivity down to a grind. Today has been one of these days. To start, I had a medical appointment at 10:30 in the town were we used to live. It is nothing of consequence, just a "skin check" with the dermatologists, but appointments in our town are hard to come by and this doctor was very attentive last time I went to see him (ahem, nine years ago), so I thought that it would be worth the 30-minute drive to save two to three months of wait. The problem is that travel times, wait times and idle times tend to compound themselves and leave very little usable time: I had to leave shortly after 9:30, so I had a little over one hour after bringing the kids to school, which I filled with the data processing and checking email. By the time I was out of the doctor's office it was close to 11:30, so I checked with Karen to see if any shopping was needed for lunch, because I could get it done on the way back to town.

The weather has been sunny all day, so she suggested getting steaks for the barbecue. I was done with the shopping around 12:30, which was too early to pick up Trevor at school, so instead I texted him to come back walking and I drove home to fire up the grill. While the charcoals started to burn I managed to get about one hour of digital lessons, but then it was lunch time and then coffee, so I was not back in front of my laptop until 15:00 and I had a video conference at 16:00.

Photo: pxphere.com

Once I was ready with the meeting it was already 17:05, so I had yet another 80 minutes before I had to drive Jason to his guitar lesson, so when we came back at 19:05 I pushed myself to get almost another hour of work before calling it a day. In total I have managed to work less than five hours today (including the video conference, which was work), but there is no way to avoid days like today. Hopefully tomorrow things will go smoother, I have a much cleaner agenda.